277. Ghiberti has not outgrown the Gothic, nor has even Donatello; and already in Michelangelo the feeling is Baroque, i.e., musical.
278. The struggle to fix the problem is visible in the series of “Apollo-figures.” See Déonna, Les Apollons archaïques (1909).
279. Woermann, Geschichte der Kunst, I (1915), p. 236. The first tendency is seen in the Samian Hera of Cheramues and the persistent turning of columns into caryatids; the second in the Delian figure dedicated to Artemis by Nicandra, with its relation to the oldest metope-technique.
280. Miletus was in a particular relation with Egypt through Naucratis.—Tr.
281. Most of the works are pediment-groups or metopes. But even the Apollo-figures and the “Maidens” of the Acropolis could not have stood free.
282. V. Salis, Kunst der Griechen (1919), pp. 47, 98 et seq.
283. The decisive preference of the white stone is itself significant of the opposition of Renaissance to Classical feeling.
284. All Greek scales are capable of reduction to “tetrachords” or four-note scales of which the form E—note—note—A is typical. In the diatonic the unspecified inner notes are F, G; in the chromatic they are F, F sharp; and in the enharmonic they are E half-sharp, F. Thus, the chromatic and enharmonic scales do not provide additional notes as the modern chromatic does, but simply displace the inner members of the scale downwards, altering the proportionate distances between the same given total. In Faustian music, on the contrary, the meaning of “enharmonic” is simply relational. It is applied to a change, say from A flat to G sharp. The difference between these two is not a quarter-tone but a “very small” interval (theory and practice do not even agree as to which note is the higher, and in tempered instruments with standardized scales the physical difference is eliminated altogether). While a note is being sounded, even without any physical change in it, its harmonic co-ordinates (i.e., substantially, the key of the harmony) may alter, so that henceforth the note, from A flat, has become G sharp.—Tr.
285. In the same way the whole of Russian music appears to us infinitely mournful, but real Russians assure us that it is not at all so for themselves.
286. See articles under these headings in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.”—Tr.
287. See Vol. II, p. 238.
288. In Baroque music the word “imitation” means something quite different from this, viz., the exact repetition of a motive in a new colouring (starting from a different note of the scale).
289. For all that survives performance is the notes, and these speak only to one who still knows and can manage the tone and technique of the expression-means appropriate to them.
290. See articles Fauxbourdon, Discant and Gimel in Grove’s “Dictionary of Music.”—Tr.
291. Note that Oresme was a contemporary of Machault and Philippe de Vitry, in whose generation the rules and prohibitions of strict counterpoint were definitively established.
293. Even the first great troubadour, Guilhem of Poitiers, though a reigning sovereign, made it his ambition to be regarded as a “professional,” as we should say.—Tr.
294. See also Vol. II, p. 365.
296. A movement in sonata form consists essentially of (a) First Subject; (b) Second Subject (in an allied key); (c) Working-out, or free development of the themes grouped under (a) and (b); and (d) Recapitulation, in which the two subjects are repeated in the key of the tonic.
The English usage is to consider (a) and (b) with the bridge or modulation connecting them, together as the “Exposition,” and the form is consequently designated “three-part.”—Tr.
297. Einstein, Gesch. der Musik, p. 67.
298. Coysevox lived 1640-1720. Much of the embellishment and statuary of Versailles is his work.—Tr.
299. See Vol. II, pp. 357 et seq., 365 et seq.
300. It was not merely national-Italian (for that Italian Gothic was also): it was purely Florentine, and even within Florence the ideal of one class of society. That which is called Renaissance in the Trecento has its centre in Provence and particularly in the papal court at Avignon, and is nothing whatever but the southern type of chivalry, that which prevailed in Spain and Upper Italy and was so strongly influenced by the Moorish polite society of Spain and Sicily.
301. Renaissance ornament is merely embellishment and self-conscious "art"-inventiveness. It is only with the frank and outspoken Baroque that we return to the necessities of high symbolism.
302. Jacob Burckhardt, Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien. (An English translation was published in 1878.—Tr.)
303. Inclusive of Paris itself. Even as late as the fifteenth century Flemish was as much spoken there as French, and the architectural appearance of the city in its oldest parts connects it with Bruges and Ghent and not with Troyes and Poitiers.
304. A. Schmarsow, Gotik in der Renaissance (1921); B. Haendke, Der niederl. Einfluss auf die Malerei Toskana-Umbriens (Monatshefte für Kunstwissensch. 1912).
305. The colossal statue of Bartolommeo Colleone at Venice.—Tr.
306. Svoboda, Römische und Romanische Paläste (1919); Rostowzew, Pompeianische Landschaften und Römische Villen (Röm. mitt., 1904).
307. Environs of Rome. They date from the late 17th and the mid-18th centuries respectively; the gardens of the V. Ludovisi were laid out by Le Nôtre.—Tr.
308. That is, the expression for the sum of a convergent series beyond any specified term.—Tr.
309. See Vol. II, pp. 117 et seq.
310. In Classical painting, light and shadow were first consistently employed by Zeuxis, but only for the shading of the thing itself, for the purpose of freeing the modelling of the body painted from the restriction of the relief-manner, i.e., without any reference to the relation of shadows to the time of day. But even with the earliest of the Netherlanders light and shade are already colour-tones and affected by atmosphere.
311. The brilliant polish of the stone in Egyptian art has a deep symbolic significance of much the same kind. Its effect is to dematerialize the statue by causing the eye to glide along its exterior. Hellas on the contrary manifests, by its progress from “Poros” stone, through Naxian, to the translucent Parian and Pentelic marbles, how determined it is that the look shall sink right into the material essence of the body.
312. See Vol. II, pp. 314 et seq.
313. The life and teaching of St. Francis were, morally and æsthetically alike, the centres of inspiration for Cimabue, Giotto and the Italian Gothic generally.—Tr.
314. Der nordische im Grenzenlose schweifende Pantheismus.
315. On the following page is a translation of this chorus.—Tr.
316. His portrait of Frau Gedon, all steeped in brown, is the last Old-Master portrait of the West; it is painted entirely in the style of the past.
317. The strings in the Orchestra represent, as a class, the colours of the distance. The bluish green of Watteau is found already in the Neapolitan bel canto of about 1700, in Couperin, in Mozart and Haydn; and the brown of the Dutch in Corelli, Handel and Beethoven. The woodwind, too, calls up illumined distances. Yellow and red, on the other hand, the colours of nearness, the popular colours, are associated with the brass timbre, the effect of which is corporeal often to the point of vulgarity. The tone of an old fiddle is entirely bodiless. It is worth remarking that the Greek music, insignificent as it is, underwent an evolution from the Dorian lyre to the Ionian flute (aulos and syrinx) and that even in the time of Pericles strict Dorians blamed this as an enervating and lowering tendency.
(The horn is an exception, and is always treated as an exception, to the brass generally. Its place is with the woodwind, and its colours are those of the distance.—Tr.)
318. The use of gold in this way, viz., to add brilliancy to bodies standing freely in the open, has nothing in common with its employment in Magian art to provide glittering backgrounds for figures seen in dim interiors.
319. The Chinese also attach enormous importance to the patinas of their old bronzes, which, owing to the different alloys used and the strong chemical characters of the soil, are of infinite variety and natural intricacy. They too, in later phases, have come to the production of artificial patina.—Tr.
320. Pausanias, it should be observed, was neither by date nor by origin a Greek.—Tr.
321. “In places, as you stand on it, the great towered and embattled enceinte produces an illusion: it looks as if it were still equipped and defended. One vivid challenge at any rate it flings down before you; it compels you to make up your mind on the matter of restoration. For myself, I have no hesitation; I prefer in every case the ruined, however ruined, to the reconstructed however splendid.... After that, I am free to say that the restoration of Carcassonne is a splendid achievement.” (Henry James, “A Little Tour in France,” xxiii.) Yet if ever there was a reconstruction carried out with piety and scholarship as well as skill, it was Viollet-le-Duc’s reconstruction of these old town-walls.—Tr.
322. Home, an English philosopher of the 18th Century, declared in a lecture on English parks that Gothic ruins represented the triumph of time over power, Classical ruins that of barbarism over taste. It was that age that first discovered the beauty of the ruin-studded Rhine, which was thenceforward the historic river of the Germans.
323. English readers will very likely think of the case of Shaw’s “Back to Methuselah,” with its extreme contrast of the cheaply-satirical present-day scene and the noble and tragic scenes of far past and far future.—Tr.
324. One need only contrast the Greek artist with Rubens and Rabelais.
325. Of whom one of his mistresses remarked that he “smelt like a carcass” (qu’il puait comme une charogne). Note also how the musician generally has a reputation for uncleanliness.
326. From the solemn canon of Polycletus to the elegance of Lysippus the same process of lightening is going on in the body-build as that which brought the column from the Doric to the Corinthian order. The Euclidean feeling was beginning to relax.
328. In other countries, e.g., old Egypt and Japan (to anticipate a particularly foolish and shallow assertion), the sight of naked men was a far more ordinary and commonplace thing than it was in Athens, but the Japanese art-lover feels emphasized nudity as ridiculous and vulgar. The act is depicted (as for that matter it is in the “Adam and Eve” of Bamberg Cathedral), but merely as an object without any significance of potential whatsoever.
329. Kluge, Deutsche Sprachgesch. (1920), pp. 202 et seq.
330. A. Conze, Die Attischen Grabreliefs (1893 etc.).
331. Louvre. Replicas of the pair in the Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—Tr.
332. Olympia—the only unquestioned original that we have from the “great age.” References would be superfluous, for few, if any, Classical works are better or more widely known.—Tr.
333. Of the several copies that have survived, all imperfectly preserved, that in the Palazzo Massimi is accounted the best. The restoration which, once seen, convinces, is Professor Furtwängler’s (shown in Ency. Brit., XI Ed., article Greek Art, fig. 68).—Tr.
334. A cast of this is in the British Museum (illustrated in the Museum Guide to Egypt. Antiq., pl. XXI).—Tr.
335. In the Bargello, Florence. Replica in Vict. and Alb. Museum, London.—Tr.
336. The “Apollo with the lyre” at Munich was admired by Winckelmann and his time as a Muse. Till quite recently a head of Athene (a copy of Praxiteles) at Bologna passed as that of a general. Such errors would be entirely impossible in dealing with a physiognomic art, e.g., Baroque.
337. In his portrait of Frau Gedon, already alluded to, p. 252.
339. The so-called “Three Fates” in the British Museum.—Tr.
340. The Orphic springtime contemplates the Gods and does not see them. See Vol. II, p. 345.
341. There was indeed a beginning of this in the aristocratic epic of Homer—so nearly akin to the courtly narrative art of Boccaccio. But throughout the Classical age strictly religious people felt it as a profanation; the worship that shines through the Homeric poems is quite without idolatry, and a further proof is the anger of thinkers who, like Heraclitus and Plato, were in close touch with the temple tradition. It will occur to the student that the unrestricted handling of even the highest divinities in this very late art is not unlike the theatrical Catholicism of Rossini and Liszt, which is already foreshadowed in Corelli and Händel and had, earlier even, almost led to the condemnation of Church music in 1564.
(The event alluded to in the last line is the dispute in and after the Council of Trent as to the nature and conduct of Church music. If Wagner’s suggestion that Pope Marcellus II tried to exclude it altogether is exaggerated, it is certain at least that the complaints were deep and powerful, and that the Council found it necessary to forbid “unworthy music in the house of God” and to bring the subject under the disciplinary control of the Bishops.—Tr.)
342. Harmodius and Aristogiton. At Naples. Illustrated in Ency. Brit. XI ed., article Greek Art, fig. 50. Cast in British Museum.—Tr.
343. The famous statue now in the Lateran Museum, Rome.—Tr.
344. See foot-note, p. 130. An antique copy is in the British Museum.—Tr.
345. In the Vatican Museum.—Tr.
346. Even the landscape of the Baroque develops from composed backgrounds to portraits of definite localities, representations of the soul of these localities which are thus endowed with faces.
347. It could be said of Hellenistic portrait art that it followed exactly the opposite course.
348. British Museum.—Tr.
349. Pinakothek, Munich.—Tr.
350. Art Gallery, Vienna.—Tr.
351. Nothing more clearly displays the decadence of Western art since the middle of the 19th century than its absurd rendering of acts by masses; the deeper meaning of act-study and the importance of the motive have been entirely forgotten.
352. By that test Rubens, and, among moderns, especially Feuerbach and Böcklin, lose, while Goya, Daumier, and, in Germany, Oldach, Wasmann, RayskiWasmann, Rayski and many another almost forgotten artist of the earlier 19th Century, gain. And Marées passes to the rank of the very greatest.
353. Tombs of the Scaligers, Verona.—Tr.
354. National Gallery, London.—Tr.
355. Museo Nazionale, Florence.—Tr.
356. It is the same “noble simplicity and quiet greatness”—to speak in the language of the German Classicists—that produces such an impression of the antique in the Romanesque of Hildesheim, Gernrode, Paulinzella and Hersfeld. The ruined cloisters of Paulinzella, in fact, have much of what Brunellesco so many centuries later strove to obtain in his palace-courts. But the basic feeling that underlies these creations is not something which we got from the Classical, but something that we projected on to our own notion of Classical being. And our own notion of peace is one of an infinite peace. We feel the “Rest in God” to be an expanse of quietude. All Florentine work, in so far as sureness does not turn into the Gothic challenge of Verrocchio, is characterized by this feeling, with which Attic σωφροσύνη has nothing whatever in common.
357. It has never been sufficiently noticed that the few sculptors who came after Michelangelo had no more than a mere workaday relation with marble. But we see at once that it is so when we think of the deeply intimate relation of great musicians to their favourite instruments. The story of Tartini’s violin, which shattered itself to pieces on the death of the master—and there are a hundred such stories—is the Faustian counterpart of the Pygmalion legend. Consider, too, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Johannes Kreisler the Kapellmeister”; he is a figure worthy to stand by the side of Faust, Werther and Don Juan. To see his symbolic significance and the inward necessity of him, we have only to compare him with the theatrical painter-characters in the works of contemporary Romanticists, who are not in any relation whatever with the idea of Painting. As the fate of 19th-Century art-romances shows—a painter cannot be made to stand for the destiny of Faustian art.
(E. T. A. Hoffmann, the strange many-sided genius who was at once musician, caricaturist, novelist, critic, wit, able public official and winebibber, at one time in his career wrote in the character of “Johannes Kreisler.” See his Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier and Der Kater Murr, also Thomas Carlyle’s “Miscellanies” and the biographical sketches of Hoffmann in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and the Ency. Brit.—Tr.)
358. Although gunpowder is much older than the Baroque, its application in real earnest to long-ranging fire-arms was only accomplished during the 16th Century. It cannot be said that there was any technical reason why 100 years should have elapsed between the first use of powder in European warfare and the first effective soldier’s fire-arm. No careful student of this period of military history can fail to be struck with this fact—the significance of which, not being technical, must be cultural. Much the same could be said of printing, which, so far as concerns technical factors, might just as well have been invented in the 10th as in the 15th Century.—Tr.
359. Uffizi, Florence.—Tr.
360. Sistine Chapel, Rome.—Tr.
361. “Doctor Marianus.”—Tr.
362. Vatican.—Tr.
363. In Renaissance work the finished product is often quite depressingly complete. The absence of “infinity” is palpable. No secrets, no discoveries.
364. Hence the impossibility of achieving a genuinely religious painting on plein-air principles. The world-feeling that underlies it is so thoroughlythoroughly irreligious, so worthless for any but a “religion of reason” so-called, that every one of its efforts in that direction, even with the noblest intentions (Uhde, Puvis de Chavannes), strikes us as hollow and false. One instant of plein-air treatment suffices to secularize the interior of a church and degrade it into a showroom.
365. State Museum, Berlin.—Tr.
366. I.e., the “giants” of the great frieze, who were in fact Galatians playing the part. This Gigantomachia, a programme-work like the Ring, represented a situation, as the Ring represented characters, under mythological labels.—Tr.
367. See Vol. II, pp. 138 et seq.
368. See pp. 197 et seq.
369. See pp. 55 et seq.
371. Primitive languages afford no foundations for abstract ordered thought. But at the beginning of every Culture an inner change takes place in the language that makes it adequate for carrying the highest symbolic tasks of the ensuing cultural development. Thus it was simultaneously with the Romanesque style that English and German arose out of the Teutonic languages of the Frankish period, and French, Italian and Spanish out of the “lingua rustica” of the old Roman provinces—languages of identical metaphysical content though so dissimilar in origin.
374. That is, discussion of the doctrines of the Eleatic school regarding unity and plurality, the Ent and Nonent, focussed themselves, in Zeno, down to the famous paradoxes concerning the nature of motion (such as “Achilles and the Tortoise”) which within the Greek discipline were unanswerable. Their general effect was to show that motion depended upon the existence of an indefinitely great plurality, that is, of infinitely small subdivisions as well as infinitely great quantities, and, the denial of this plurality being the essential feature of the Eleatic philosophy, its application to motion was bound to produce “paradoxes.”
The enunciations, with a brief but close critique, will be found in the Ency. Brit., XI ed., Article Zeno of Elea. Here it suffices to draw attention to the difficulties that are caused by the absence (or unwelcome presence) of time and direction elements, not only in the treatment of plurality itself (which is conceived of indifferently as an augmentation or as a subdivision of the finite magnitude) but especially in the conclusion of the “arrow” paradox and in the very obscure enunciation of Paradox 8.—Tr.
375. See Vol. II, pp. 296 et seq.
376. De Boer, Gesch. d. Philos. im Islam (1901), pp. 93, 108.
377. A detailed summary will be found in Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Kabbalah, by Dr. Ginsburg and Dr. Cook.—Tr.
378. See Windelband, Gesch.Gesch. d. neueren Philosophie (1919), I, 208; also Hinnebert, Kultur der Gegenwart, I, V (1913), p. 484.
379. See Ency. Brit., XI ed., article Cartesianism (V, 421).—Tr.
380. See Vol. II, p. 296.
381. When, therefore, in the present work also, precedence is consistently given to Time, Direction and Destiny over Space and Causality, this must not be supposed to be the result of reasoned proofs. It is the outcome of (quite unconscious) tendencies of life-feeling—the only mode of origin of philosophic ideas.
383. See Vol. II, p. 363.
384. In the German, “Vor allem aber sein eignes Ich.” (But in Luther’s Bible, characteristically, “Auch dazu sein eigen Leben.”)—Tr.
385. Barnasha. The underlying idea is not the filial relation, but an impersonal coming-up in the field of mankind.
386. ἐθέλω and βούλομαι imply, to have the intention, or wish, or inclination (βουλή means counsel, council, plan, and ἐθέλω has no equivalent noun). Voluntas is not a psychological concept but, like potestas and virtus, a thoroughly Roman and matter-of-fact designation for a practical, visible and outward asset—substantially, the mass of an individual’s being. In like case, we use the word energy. The “will” of Napoleon is something very different from the energy of Napoleon, being, as it were, lift in contrast to weight. We must not confuse the outward-directed intelligence, which distinguishes the Romans as civilized men from the Greeks as cultured men, with “will” as understood here. Cæsar is not a man of will in the Napoleonic sense. The idioms of Roman law, which represent the root-feeling of the Roman soul far better than those of poetry, are significant in this regard. Intention in the legal sense is animus (animus occidendi); the wish, directed to some criminal end, is dolus as distinct from the unintended wrongdoing (culpa). Voluntas is nowhere used as a technical term.
387. The Chinese soul “wanders” in its world. This is the meaning of the East-Asiatic perspective, which places the vanishing point in the middle of the picture instead of in the depth as we do. The function of perspective is to subject things to the “I,” which in ordering comprehends them; and it is a further indication that “will”—the claim to command the world—is absent from the Classical make-up that its painting denies the perspective background. In Chinese perspective as in Chinese technique (see Vol. II, p. 627), directional energy is wanting, and it would not be illegitimate to call East-Asiatic perspective, in contrast with the powerful thrust into depth of our landscape-painting, a perspective of “Tao”; for the world-feeling indicated by that word is unmistakably the operative element in the picture.